


Second Chances

by Write_like_an_American



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Apologies, Daddy Issues, Drinking, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Family, Family Drama, Family Feels, Fix-It, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Jealousy, Light Angst, M/M, Mpreg, Mpreg AND drinking, Team as Family, Yondad, Yondu is a garbage fire, minor discussion of abortion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-18 15:59:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13684986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Write_like_an_American/pseuds/Write_like_an_American
Summary: Battle's over. Ego's dead. Yondu's all healed up and ready to party, baby on board.Peter? Peter's in the airlock again.





	Second Chances

**Author's Note:**

> **Me: It's Valentine's day! Everyone deserves cute fluffy fic!!!! Also me: no, give them The Pain**

_He may have been your father, boy, but he weren’t your daddy._

What a crock of bilgesnipe shite.

Peter stormed through the _Quadrant’s_ intestines, trench coat whipping behind him in a leathery comet-tail. Nice to know Yondu lied about that, like he lied about damn near everything else.

Every beat of his boots made the grills boom and shake; every porthole got treated to a choleric scowl. He stomped and he sulked and he shoved the Zune’s hard plastic earbuds deep enough that the scream of the Sex Pistols rattled the bones in his skull.

You see, once the battle was won and the ashes cleared, once Yondu was released from Stakar’s medbay (or rather, once he released himself; his gaolers figured that if he could slip gravimetric handcuffs and hack the biolock he had every right to be back on his feet), and once he and his old crew hugged it out, punched it out, and summarily forgave each other; Kraglin and Yondu did what most couples do when they stumble upon career stability and a lack of responsibilities. They settled down to start a family.

Like they didn’t already have one, the dicks.

They broke the news the morning after. They lured the Guardians out of their cabins with the smell of fresh-brewed caff and streaky bilgesnipe-bacon.

As Yondu took charge of the cooking, the bacon turned out crispy, veering on carbonized. The smoke had just begun to clear by the time the crew gathered in the mess hall, yawning, sleep-dishevelled, pawing crusty eyes.

That was okay. By the time breakfast hit plate, the Guardians had lost their appetites. You see, while watching a grill for five minutes was beyond Yondu’s capabilities, he promised to put more effort into minding the buns in his oven.

Every single one of them.

“Four,” Peter growled, kicking the nearest wall. “ _Four._ Greedy bastards.”

He wasn’t being entirely fair. Yondu couldn’t _help_ that his species carried multiple embryos.

Equally, he couldn't help being freakishly fertile for his advanced years. As soon as he and Kraglin ditched the usual sterilizing pill-cocktail downed by every randy spacer who wanted to avoid bastards being posted to them via Wormhole Express, his body kicked into maternal overdrive.

On the plus side, at least one was likely to be eaten in utero. Especially if they inherited their papas' fangs.

Peter galumphed into the rear airlock. The _Quadrant_ took up an approximate fourth of the _Eclector’s_ mass, but she was the centerpiece around which the Ravagers had constructed their shabby citadel. This airlock once formed the halfway point of a tunnel Peter had been chased down more times than he could count, giggling or screaming depending on Yondu’s mood.

Nowadays, the memory of that corridor stretched further than the corridor itself. It had been truncated, the heavy blast door unrolling in a peal of rusted gears. Plasma charges, planted before Peter was born, had seared along ancient weld lines, and the _Quadrant_ detached like a lice hopping hosts, a rocket breaking up in atmosphere.

Peter couldn't get any further from the cockpit than this, not without paddling in the vacuum. That was okay. Wasn't like he’d be missed.

Yondu invited Aleta and Stakar to the baby shower. They invited Martinex and Charlie, who invited Mainframe and Krugarr, and before you knew it the Bridge overflowed with wrinkly space pirates, all sloshing moonshine (and teaming up to keep that moonshine out of Yondu’s reach, much to his annoyance). They were joshing about and having a rollicking good time, swapping anecdotes about battles Peter didn’t remember, parties he never attended, stories he’d never been told.

He scarcely knew other Ravagers _existed_ before this astral month. Yondu wasn't the chattiest when it came to his past. You’d struggle to pry details out of him with tongue screws and a mallet.

But that being said, the past few weeks dredged up far more dirt than Peter cared to know. The new knowledge cleared up a lot, but it still left Peter with more questions than answers.

Questions like: now Ogord and his fellow captains were all singing the space pirate equivalent of kum-buy-yah (it involved a lot of headlocks and sucker-punches and obnoxious laughter) where the hell did Peter fit?

He didn’t know. Yondu didn’t seem to either.

And so, Peter sat in the airlock. He kicked the nearest fan vent to Johnny Rotten’s nasal, furious croon, and he watched space flow by.

He spent his whole life searching for family. He thought he found it with the Guardians. For four whole months, he'd been satisfied with his gaggle of stragglers and misfits, the lot of them tossed together and stir-fried in the great wok of life.

Then, before he knew it, fathers started crawling out of the woodwork. Now grandparents and aunts thrust themselves at him from every direction, and there were three-maybe-four siblings on the way. And Peter was expected to…

What? Feel like he mattered?

Peter missed the _Milano._ Missed being able to gun for a distant star, to feel his girl vibrating under him, joystick jumping in his palm as if she was as eager to blast off as he was.

On day-cycles like this one, when the pipes hummed with drunken yodels and the ship crushed in around him, claustrophobic as the air ducts Peter crammed himself through as a child, he missed his old bird more than ever.

Peter couldn’t make out words. Not individually. Aleta’s yipping hyena-cackle was unmistakable though. She'd forced Kraglin through some ritualistic humiliation of fatherhood involving fuses, compacted blasting jelly, and a helluva lot of moonshine.

Yet another Ravager custom from time immemorial. Another fragment of their culture that Yondu never bothered to introduce him to.

Peter slouched with his arms crossed over his knees, glowering through the blast-proof glass. Exhaust ribbons shrunk like contrails on fast-forwards. They faded from waxy red, to orange, to yellow and dismal grey.

Peter longed to follow them. To dive into the silent black and watch the _Quadrant_ gambol for the far-off nebula, leaving him far behind.

How long before they missed him? How long before Yondu, surrounded by family new and old, forgot about the Terran brat he'd used and abused and loved all the same?

Perhaps, if Peter put enough distance between himself and the bedlam in the cockpit, he’d feel in control of this drift. He pulled in one direction and Yondu in the other – and the worst thing of all? Yondu had yet to notice.

However, the blue shithead had always been far more perceptive than Peter gave him credit for.

Peter heard the creak, although he pretended not to. He could see who'd just dragged the airlock door open and swaggered on in, reflected against the dark well of space. Even when he shut his eyes there was no escaping him.

Hot leather, BO, sour breath. Sourer fumes from whatever he'd been drinking.

Yondu Udonta. The closest thing to _home_ Peter knew. And if that wasn't a cause for misery, he didn't know what was.

“I'm not gonna jump,” he muttered as Yondu slumped beside him – collapsed more like, legs giving out in an undignified heap. “Uh. Y'know you're not supposed to be drinking?”

“One can't hurt,” slurred Yondu. When Peter eased his half-full glass from his fingers, he let it go without fuss.

“C'mon. You _want_ the brats to have like, defects and shit? They might have three legs! Or no eyes, or...”

“Or all stuck together in a big lump.” Yondu shuddered to himself. “Like beasties atta bottom of a tin.”

Peter recoiled from a single sniff at his tankard. “Shit! Yeah, you really ain't supposed to be drinking this. I thought the others were supposed to be keeping an eye on you?”

“Don't need no _shay.... shay-per-own..._ Minder. I don't need one of them, I don't.”

“And yet here you are. Pregnant and drunk.” The glass clinked sharply off the metal. Yondu's jump lagged a second behind. He giggled at himself, then more at Peter's scowl.

“L-lighten up, brat...”

“You're shit at this. You're gonna be a terrible parent.”

Yondu's face was too slack to broadcast offence. He tried to scowl, but his mouth drooped like he'd had a stroke, and intermittent giggles sputtered to the surface like bubbles in a billabong.

“Now I - listen here. Star-car an' 'Leeta says they'd babysit.”

“Stakar and Aleta's children _died._ All of them.” Peter took a breath. “But it's not them I'm pissed at. It's you.”

Yondu pressed a disbelieving hand to his jacket breast. He missed the first couple of times, but didn't give up. Eventually he arranged himself at a generous upright, clutching his flame patch in scandal. “Me?”

The flame was secured with the tailor’s sober seam-stitch. Sober was the last thing Yondu was, and the tailor was dead. Just like all the rest.

“Yeah, you, a-hole.” Peter's confidence grew for every moment Yondu didn't whistle. “You were a shitty, irresponsible parent to me and you're gonna be a shitty, irresponsible parent to them. Why the hell would you put another kid through having you for a daddy?”

“Yer right,” said Yondu.

“I mean, how many times did you threaten to eat me? Hit me? I don’t care if they were ‘just taps’ – they _scared_ me, Yondu! I was just a kid, being kicked about by a grown-ass man, and – I’m right?”

Yondu hooked his knees and pulled them to his chest. It was a slow and clumsy process, but by the end of it, Peter shared the airlock with a dejected lump of blue skin and red leather who looked no way near as happy as anyone at their baby shower ought to.

But Yondu wasn’t at his baby shower, was he?

Peter sucked his lower lip into his mouth until he tasted stubble.

“I’m a shit captain an’ a shit daddy,” Yondu declared. He didn’t look at Peter. He clutched his knees tighter, nails scratching the folded leather, and his bared teeth scraped with the sound of an M-ship screeching messily into dock.

“Don’t deserve you, don’t deserve Stakar, don’t deserve Kraglin… Definitely don’t deserve _these_. Not after everythin’. Not after the shit I pulled.” He balled a fist against his gut like he wanted to rip them out there and then.

Peter’s gaze flicked to the tumbler. The spirits didn’t settle – they shook with the reverberations of the engines, a rumble too familiar for him or Yondu to feel.

“So what?” he asked softly. “You have a drink?”

Yondu looked thoroughly miserable. It didn’t suit him. “I have a drink,” he rasped, and reached around Peter for the glass.

Peter grabbed his wrist. “Stoppit.”

Yondu’s eyes were baggier than ever, hooded by folds of dark blue skin. They looked bruised and puffy and sore, and maybe Peter wasn’t the only one who’d come here in need of a little solitude.

“You know what I did,” he said, deceptively soft, like he was trying to make Peter see it from his side, convert him so he'd just let him take the glass and swan dive past rock bottom into whatever fiery chasm broiled below. “To yer siblings?” He caught Peter’s eyes twitching to his stomach, and shook his head with a humorless chuff. “Not them. Yer other ones.”

Peter nodded.

Nevertheless, he pushed Yondu’s hand away from the liquor. It shivered, its surface wrinkled with ripples like the sheets on a well-used bed.

“I also know that you like to sabotage yourself before anything goes right,” he said. He was surprised to discover the truth of those words as they left him. “You talk to Kraglin about this?”

Yondu didn’t fight him. Didn’t seem to have the energy. Peter wished he could blame it on the babies, or the drink – which Yondu had been chugging in an effort to pickle his offspring before they got big enough to bully.

“We don’t talk,” he said hollowly. “Not about shit like this.”

Peter considered shaking him, but he didn’t want to make the old coot throw up. “You’ve been in a relationship for how many years? No – don't deny it, asshole. You _do_ talk about this, Yondu, and if you don’t then now’s the time to start.”

“An’ – an’ how do I start that conversation, Petey? _I’m sorry Krags but I don’t want these brats you’ve been hungerin’ for since you first started stickin’ yer dick in me?_ How d’you think that’s gonna go?”

Peter tamped down on that image before it tried to project itself in his mind’s eye. “Not like that,” he said flatly. “You never apologize for shit.”

For a brilliant second, fire blazed through the doped glaze of Yondu’s eyes. Then it extinguished again, soused by drink and melancholia. He slumped on Peter’s shoulder, cheek slack against his jacket. Whisky-breath mottled the leather.

“M’sorry,” he mumbled.

“Did you hear what I just said? Don’t start like that with Kraglin – it’ll feel unnatural.”

“No.” The hand on his sleeve tightened. Yondu was heavy for his size, a dense-packed little brick of a man. He molded to Peter like weighted clingfilm. “No, I ain’t talkin’ to… to Kraggles right now. M’- m’ talkin’ to you, Petey. An’… An’ m’sorry. S’true. Didn’t do none of it right.”

Peter could shove him off. He had every right to. He could suggest adoption, or abortion – heavens knows the brats would thank him.

Or he could curl his arm around Yondu’s back, the prosthetic jabbing him in the jaw, and tell him, low and grudgingly soft:

“Yeah, yeah. That’s what second chances are for.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> **I wrote this AAAAGES ago, for Cuddles' birthday on the Discord. But alas, it was a bit too dismal for that, and my usual Winter Blues conspired to tell me it wasn't good enough to publish. Comments and kudos prove me wrong!**


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